But my mom is pissed at me—and she was the one helping me get my science fiction novella mss published,—so now I’m investing more into my blogosphere. Every time I open up my science fiction mss, I freeze. My brain cramps up. I force myself to write 300 words. On the good days, I make it to 500.

So I’m hiding here in my blogosphere, and I’m not just “writing lots of blogs,” because I’ve always been writing blogs, but I’m sprinkling Amazon Associate links around, too.

As I mention products, I will include links to Amazon so you can purchase them. For instance, this is absolutely my favorite tea to drink in the entire world.

I don’t like banner ads, pop-up ads, or any randomized ads, so if I provide a link, I always put it there to match context—to illustrate a piece of the story, as if I picked up the object from the stage and showed it to the audience all over.

If I inspire you buy something from one of these links, awesome! If you pass, that’s cool, and I hope it doesn’t detract from your reading experience. If it ever does, though—let me know. Continuous, life-long, constructive feedback is one of my dreams.

The Launchpad

I call this particular blog, Kourtnie.net, my launchpad. It’s like I’m building a little city of different blogs, novellas, and art projects—entrepreneurial ventures to 1) keep the cat food money coming in, 2) join the voices of the autistic blogging community, and 3) keep my mind clear of negative thinking—and the launchpad is where I connect all the sinews together.

This is the only website that links to every online story, article, and poem I’ve published on my fav journals and communities, like Barely South Reviewand The Mighty;

This is the only website that links to all my social medias, Patreon, and WordPresses, as part of my favorite menu style—dropdowns—! ⛷

This is the only website I’ve planned out for 5 years of writing.

Here are three of my writing zany-brainy ideas, totally not shy to share in blogoland:

Cleo’s Autism Awareness is the blog second closest to my heart, after the Kourtnie.net Launchpad. This is because I identify strongly with the autism spectrum; I see it as a gift, a community, a differability, the reason I’m able to toy with fantasy and science fiction universes in my head as if I were perceiving alternate realities, with equal depths and delicate natures.

My Quest for Chicken is my gardening and mental illness awareness blog, and it needs a lot more love, but then I was starved of self-care time for four months, and I’m still recuperating, so that explains the vacancies in the identified areas of need. I plan on updating this blog daily in May, after I finish my 30-day autism awareness challenge at Cleo’s blog.

Reminiscencing is not a word,—it’s a character from one of my short stories—but that’s the whole idea I’m exploring in this online vocabulary slash poetry journal. When I teach vocabulary to my students, I tell them they can either learn through memorization, or we can take the memory backdoor with mnemonics—and both these strategies are good—but to really see a word, I prefer the emotional backdoor, which is studying the words as stories, as etymology, living breathing things with prefixes, suffixes, roots. Words are symbols, made out of complex cultural decisions, stereotypes and generational decisions, subjective based on context, discourse, audience; I try to get them all jazzed picturing words as characters. And Reminiscencing, my character slash fictitious word, is my dearest example of this magical way I perceive each piece of every language; it’s poetry about words that captivate me, inspire me, have many meanings beneath, a playground where I reframe my language and its meaning.

So I’m building my little virtual launchpad for entrepreneurial writing, coaxing my inner Troy Tech writer-nerd to sprinkle science fiction and slice-of-life on the Internet, and that’s what’s happening in my life. Aren’t blogs such a gift, when they can enable a socially anxious autistic person to share ideas like this?

That’s what blogs feel like, a deflation, a giddy story, a confessional. Previous generations call it a diary.

I keep several diaries too, in composition notebooks mostly, with washi tape, alcohol pens, gel pens, 🙀FELT PENS😻; lots of ink. Each composition book has a purpose. Each blog ends up with a purpose, too. A notebook for teaching at FCC. A notebook for when my Muses come to me, unformed, wild, often confused.

When Millennials took diaries to the InternetAwyeah, that’s right: Baby Boomers might’ve wrecked the environment, and Gen X might’ve chucked humanity onto a hell-screaming rollercoaster called the Internet, but we plan on sabotaging everything WITH PHOTOS OF OUR MEALS., Gen X and Baby Boomers cried, “No one cares about what you ate for lunch!” and some Millennials screamed that at one another, too. Others simply screamed.

Once Upon a Time 😎 Twenties Part-timer

In the 2000s, like many other now-eldering millenials”Once Upon a Times” are where I encapsulate memories of my past; new “Once Upon a Time” posts go up once week. Read here for more information on my weekly updates., I thought, well, my thoughts mattered; like really, really mattered—like I was someone big.

I worked two part-time jobs on my choice, on my terms:

8-hour weeks at a Plantronics distributor
with an employee count of four, followed by

12-hour weeks at a swim school, listening
to Orange County mothers pissing on-&-onabout how their daughter’s swim lesson
needed to be 15 minutes earlier,
or she wouldn’t make it
to cello lessons on time.

I attended community college so the universities couldn’t make money off my freshman and sophomore years. I had a real attitude back then.

In My Life Today 💘 Valentine’s Day Vacation

Chase and I took a trip to Solvang on February 11th & 12th, thanks to a Groupon I purchased in November with a 20% off local deals coupon.I love to use coupons on Groupons. We enjoyed early Valentine’s Day celebratory wine-and-dining. I fed ostriches.

Poetry is Safer than Home 🛰 Stowaway

In my mid-twenties, I succumbed
to the almighty whelm of the computer,
tucking blogs, diaries, and poetry journals
into closets, treasure boxes, and clouds;

until I was ready to return
to myself, to the love
for writing: to here.

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Published by Kourtnie

Kourtnie McKenzie holds an MFA (Fiction) from Fresno State and a BA in English (Literature Studies) from Cal State Fullerton. When she isn't writing novellas, she's moonlighting as a professor at Fresno City College and College of the Sequoias. To read more of her writing, visit en.gravatar.com/kourtnie.
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